Anzhela Ayvazyan’s granddaughter was coming out of kindergarten when the shooting started. As soon as the five-year-old heard the gunfire, she put her head down and ran straight home. “She’s a clever girl,” says Ayvazyan, “she knew not to stop anywhere.”

This time nobody was hurt, but everyone knows that in Movses, a tiny village in the north-east Berd region of Armenia, the snipers will attack again. As Ayvazyan says, “it’s just a matter of time.”

For families in Movses, this attack in late July is part of daily life. The village sits just 300m from the Azerbaijani border and locals say that 90% of their village is under surveillance from an Azeri observation post to the east, with many homes in plain view of snipers.....

This Toronto doctor's Holocaust Saga 'should be rememberedforever'--and others will be too

Stories of survival like those of Saya Victor Feinman – who escaped aconcentration camp and was sheltered in Poland for more than a year –are being brought to new generations by a Canadian project to makeHolocaust testimonies more accessible, Tu Thanh Ha reports At age 93,nearly seven decades after passing his medical examinations and becomingone of Canada’s most prominent specialists in treating liver diseases,Saya Victor Feinman still works three days a week at his Torontopractice. While it is known that Dr. Feinman is a Holocaust survivorfrom Poland, few outside his family knew the details of his escape froma Nazi camp or the months he spent in hiding with 10 others in anisolated

Lala Meredith-Vula is showing a series of photographs that mark her personal journey of rediscovering her roots and her own identity during the past 25years, including the aftermath of war in Bosnia and Kosovo. Lala will also feature works from the blood feud reconciliation movement in Kosova from 1990 – 1991 and the incredible time in the Kosovar history when people decided to bring an end to blood feuds and to stop the killing which lasted for over a hundred years and sometimes until all men of the two involved families were killed. The blood feuds were often influenced by the fifteenth-century canon of Lek Dukagjini, a set of traditional Albanian laws.

Tamar Haytayan is a Vancouver-based photographer working from a documentary perspective to capture candid moments of the culture of everyday life. A central theme of several of her projects has been her Armenian heritage and the traumatic effects of the Armenian Genocide on her ancestors and the diaspora. She has shown at the Armenian Centre for Contemporary Art (Yerevan, Armenia), PhotoHaus Gallery (Vancouver, Canada), Philadelphia Photo Arts Center (Philadelphia, USA), and, most recently, the Women's Art Show (Vancouver, Canada). she has collaborated with the performance artist and poet Dr. Celeste Snowber (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada) and currently works at the University of British Columbia.

The Dilijan Arts Observatory, an experimental and interdisciplinary think-tank, intends to develop new models for art and higher education. This international event, the first of its kind in Armenia, will gather artists, cultural historians, and environmental scientists from 14 countries, meeting between August 22–September 11, 2016. For further information, see:

Regina Indian Industrial School history captured on film through the RIIS from Amnesia project, created by Janine Windolph and Trudy Stewart. Windolph is the President of Mispon: A Celebration of Indigenous Fimmaking, and Stewart is the Festival Director.

For Krzysztof Wodiczko, a flashback means traumatic re-emergence of memories from the past, characterised by psychological conditions such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). This presentation brings together exhibits from over 40 years spent working in collaboration with marginalised communities such as war veterans and the homeless. Wodiczko’s large-scale installation Guests (2011), originally commissioned for the 53rd Venice Biennale, forms a central part of the exhibition, reflecting in this context on the current migratory crisis and debates around immigration. Veteran Helmet was created in 2015, and uses technology and prosthetics to aid veterans suffering from PTSD to share their experience of the condition. Other works include the Homeless Vehicle Project (1988–89), for which Wodiczko worked with members of the homeless community in New York to create tools to aid their survival and communication....

In 2001, filmmaker Atom Egoyan was invited to respond to the work of artist Shirin Neshat as part of an introduction to a catalogue commissioned by the Musée D’Art Contemporain in Montreal. This catalogue commemorated Neshat's first major solo exhibition at the MACM, and Egoyan was asked to write about his experience of her work.

He writes:

When I was asked to write this text, I was feeling despondent. I felt that my purpose for making films had become confused by a culture where image-making had lost its sense of rarity. I was desperate to find something which would give me a sense that what I was about to do — contribute yet more images to an image-saturated culture — might have purpose and meaning. Then I experienced Shirin Neshat’s Turbulent.

Egoyan was clearly affected by Neshat's work, and this small connection between the two artists is only one of the many lines which Meet in the Middle hopes to draw out and illuminate. The rest of Egoyan's essay is available at Filmmaker magazine online, and in the meantime, you too can watch the work which so influenced Egoyan.

You can also see an installation of Shirin Neshat's Soliloquy at the MacKenzie Art Gallery from December 14, 2013 to April 27, 2014.

This project developed out of an interest in the installation work of renowned Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan. Although best known for his single-channel, theatrical release films, Egoyan has historically worked interdisciplinary, creating installations for galleries, directing operas and musicals, and even writing librettos.

Below is an example of a 2010 installation at the Toronto International Film Festival Bell Lightbox, commissioned for the opening of their new facility.

Meet in the Middle was workshopped by Elizabeth Matheson and Christine Ramsay at the Time-Based Media Curatorial Intensive of the Independent Curators International (New York City, October 6-14, 2013). See: